By Eric Ravenscraft
Publication Date: 2026-03-24 21:00:00
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Nvidia might be courting controversy with its recent DLSS 5 tech, but the company’s GPUs are still pretty powerful devices for running your games. If you have an RTX card in your desktop or laptop, you might be able to get even better performance out of it than you’re already seeing. Here are some of my favorite hacks to optimize your Nvidia GPU.
Enable DLSS to boost your frame rates (or disable to save on performance)
Nvidia’s Deep Learning Super Sampling (or DLSS) is actually a suite of features collectively aimed at improving the resolution and frame rate of your games. Some of this involves rendering lower-resolution frames and using machine learning to upscale them, while the more recent DLSS 4 and 4.5 models can generate intermediate frames between traditionally rendered ones. In most cases, this means a smoother frame rate, at a lower computational cost.
Of course, DLSS doesn’t come at zero computational cost, and that trade-off might not be worth it for you. Competitive online games or fast-paced action shooters often benefit from smoother frame rates, but some games are perfectly fine at 60 fps or so. In some games, you can turn off DLSS specifically, or you might find a more simplified toggle between Performance and Quality modes. It’s worth experimenting with these settings to see whether your prefer higher visual fidelity, or smoother frame rates.
I should also…
